But then a while later, I saw exactly the same text tweeted by someone else. Then again by another account, a few days later, then again. This went on, week after week. Gradually, the frequency increased, and now at any time there are hundreds of recent tweets with that text:

Simply, it’s a way for spammers to make their spammy accounts look real. By copying the content of other tweets and adding that to a database of tweets from which their spambots can randomly select, they make themselves appear completely legitimate.

The tweets have been written out by a real human being so in isolation they can’t be separated from auto-generated foobar, making algorithmic detection very difficult.

You might think that they could pick up many accounts tweeting the same thing. In fact, Twitter already stops you from tweeting the same thing again within a short timeframe. However, with an estimated 5,000+ tweets sent every *second* picking out the minute fraction of those that are the same is going to be very difficult. Not only that but as the tweets Andy has found show, these can be spread over several minutes or days. I’ve seen one particular tweet repeated occasionally over several months.

Sometimes, if I need a break from real work, I might sit there and report a bunch of them, but that’s about as useful as pissing into the wind in reality.

Funny you say that 😉 I did once have an idea for a sort of crowd sources spam reporting thing whereby reporting a spam user would flash it up to other users to do the same, multiplying the effect of each report.

It never went anywhere because, clearly, Twitter would destroy such a tool in no time.

I’ve seen this before, plenty of times. It’s more than just common practice, it’s an epidemic. Twitter must be aware of the problem.

I suspect they see it as a low priority because if I you and I can read the behaviour patterns, they must also be able to, and so far they’ve done nothing (besides introduce that futile ‘report for spam’ button).

One that I’ve been affected by recently is a set of accounts re-posting a comment from someone that was an @-reply to me. I mark all as spam, but for reference I’ve left this example alone. I’ve had about twenty so far, averaging one every couple of days.